The Value of Testing

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Students hate tests, and so do teachers. For the student, they are a pain to study for and a worry to take. For the teacher, they are a nuisance to give and a bother to grade. But research shows that failing to give tests is bad educational practice. This is because if you test your students, they will probably better retain the material you are presenting. And oddly enough, they can do so without studying more or harder.

The Testing Effect: The journal Psychological Science noted this outcome in a 2006 report. According to the researchers, “Taking a memory test not only assesses what one knows, but also enhances later retention, a phenomenon known as the testing effect.” They added, “Testing is a powerful means of improving learning, not just assessing.”

Oddly enough, tested students can actually do better with less study. According to a media report,

….students who relied on repeated study alone frequently developed a false sense of confidence about their mastery of the materials even while their grasp of important detail was sliding away. By comparison, students who were either tested repeatedly or tested themselves while revising scored dramatically higher marks. A group of students who read a piece of text 14 times, for example, recalled less than a self-testing group who had read the piece only three or four times.

Now, let’s move from the immediate findings of this research to the realm of common sense. Teachers have long known that testing plays a key role in teaching and learning.

Self-tests in language promote retention, while process-focused tests (for example, writing a journal or preparing to give an oral presentation) activate language. Testing has many other uses. Through testing, both teacher and learner get a better sense of the student’s progress. They encourage students to self-evaluate and they promote autonomy in learning. We can use them to provide a sense of closure to a unit or a course of study. They can give your students a better sense of where their competence has improved, and they can give you feedback on how effective you are as a teacher.

Traditional and Alternative Assessments: Traditional forms of testing fall into four basic categories. (1) Proficiency tests give general information on student language proficiency level. They are not specific to any particular program. (2) Placement tests are designed to be appropriate for a specific program. These tests should reflect the goals and ability levels in the program and help you place students within the program. (3) Achievement tests, which should be part of every language curriculum, should be specific to the goals and objectives of a specific language course. (4) Finally, diagnostic tests focus on individual student’s strengths and weaknesses. You can use information from diagnostic tests to help your students improve in particular areas of weakness.

There are many ways to create standard tests for language students. They are commercially available, and many schools have files of hoary old tests you can borrow or emulate. A frequently raised concern about these tests is the question of whether they have validity (they measure what they are supposed to measure); reliability (the tests are consistent); and objectivity (the assessment is unbiased). In terms of this discussion, those are issues for another day.

From the communicative language teaching perspective, a more pressing weakness of traditional testing is that it is neither communicative nor authentic. Given the importance of assessment as a teaching aid, however, it is worth looking at alternative ways to test foreign language students. For language learners more than for other learners, perhaps, alternatives are particularly important.

There are four obvious forms of alternative assessment. Observe your students, writing notes in student records. Meet with them. Have them write journals. And have them create portfolios of their work. These are just a sample, however, and they are not systematic. For system, consider a review by Jo-Ellen Tannenbaum.

The Alternatives: The American educator wrote a commentary on alternative assessment. She pictures the landscape in these words:

Many educators have come to recognize that alternative assessments are an important means of gaining a dynamic picture of students' academic and linguistic development. “Alternative assessment refers to procedures and techniques which can be used within the context of instruction and can be easily incorporated into the daily activities of the school or classroom”. It is particularly useful with (language) students because it employs strategies that ask students to show what they can do. In contrast to traditional testing, “students are evaluated on what they integrate and produce rather than on what they are able to recall and reproduce”. Although there is no single definition of alternative assessment, the main goal is to “gather evidence about how students are approaching, processing, and completing real-life tasks in a particular domain”.

Alternative assessments, she added, generally meet the following criteria:
• Focus is on documenting individual student growth over time, rather than comparing students with one another.
• Emphasis is on students' strengths (what they know), rather than weaknesses (what they don't know).
• Consideration is given to the learning styles, language proficiencies, cultural and educational backgrounds, and grade levels of students.

In her thoughtful article, Tannenbaum puts alternative assessments into five categories. The first she calls “non-verbal assessment strategies”, in which students use physical demonstration or pictures, for example, to illustrate their comprehension.

A second is the KWL chart. The initials refer to “what I know/what I want to know/what I've learned”, and she advocates using this tool to begin and end a unit of study. In an EFL class, you might begin by surveying students on their course expectations. At various points in the course, you could then assess what they know and what they are learning. At the end of the unit, you can work with the students to determine how much they have learned of what they wanted to know.

Tannenbaum also suggests oral performances or presentations as alternative forms of testing. “Performance-based assessments include interviews, oral reports, role plays, describing, explaining, summarizing, retelling, paraphrasing stories or text material, and so on.” Other possibilities include role play and oral presentations. She adds that oral assessments should be conducted regularly so you can monitor your students’ comprehension and thinking skills.

A fourth cluster of alternatives includes what she calls “oral and written products.” She suggests that the teacher can assess student progress include “content area thinking and learning logs, reading response logs, writing assignments (both structured and creative), dialogue journals, and audio or video cassettes.”

Finally, she advocates the portfolio of student work, collected over time to track student development. She suggests that portfolios should include a variety of materials -- audio- and videotaped recordings of readings or oral presentations, for example; writing samples and assignments; conference or interview notes and anecdotal records; and tests and quizzes.

Individualized assessment can be a time-consuming task, and it will drift into the realm of the virtually impossible if you ever find yourself with, for example, several large classes of university students. However, the case for assessment is compelling. After all, your responsibility as a teacher is to promote learning among your students, and the much-hated practice of testing can be one of the great tools toward achieving that goal.

A Study in Thai

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Many of the characteristic errors Thais make in English are directly related to interference from their own language and culture. “Contrastive analysis” is the process of understanding learner errors by comparing the make-up of a second language with the learner’s native tongue. In these notes, we make a start.

Thai society is highly stratified, and differences in social status are reflected in Thai grammar. The royal family has its own set of pronouns and word uses, used exclusively by its members and those who work for them. So does the Buddhist establishment. Thus, there are four major “registers” – subsets of language used in particular social settings – in Thai speech. These are royal, ecclesiastical, polite and vernacular.

Besides being stratified, Thailand has brought together diverse groups of people over a very short period of time, and the country’s borders with it neighbours are porous. As a result, Thai is one of many languages spoken in the country. Others include Khmer, along the border with Cambodia, and a variety of Burmese and tribal languages in the north and along the Thai/Myanmar border.

Thais speak four main dialects. The central dialect, which is the official language of Thailand, is spoken in Bangkok and environs. This dialect is known as klang. The other three major dialects are khammauang, spoken in the north; lao, which is used in the northeast, and tâi, which is the southern dialect.

Grammar: Thai is a flexible language which has no prefixes or suffixes, no genders for nouns, no articles, no plurals and no verb conjugations. It is a high-context language, which means it conveys much information through context rather than through linguistic rules.

On the other hand, it has at least 49 pronouns, including at least 17 for “I” and 19 for “you.” The choice of pronoun indicates the gender of the speaker: for instance, põm means “I” for a male; diichán means “I” for a female. The other pronouns indicate the degree of familiarity you have with the person you are addressing, the nature of the conversation (for example, personal or business), and the level of respect you wish to show. Personal pronouns do not change, regardless of their place within a sentence. There are no possessive pronouns in Thai.

To complicate matters further – from an English speaker’s perspective, – Thais will frequently use nouns (including proper nouns) as pronouns. For example, young girls and sometimes even young women use the Thai word for mouse as the personal pronoun “I.” Women especially, but also men, also sometimes use their personal names instead of the pronoun “I”. When talking to or about foreigners, Thais will occasionally substitute faràng (Thai for “foreigner”) for “you, him, her or them.”

Thai uses particles as polite “closing” words, or to indicate degree of familiarity between the speakers. These one-syllable words are always found at the end of a clause or sentence. Since a single sentence may have several clauses, it may also repeat the same particle several times. The most common particles are khâ (used by women) and khráp (used by men.) These particles literally mean “yes” in polite Thai, and can be used scores of times in a single conversation. Particles suggest courtesy and power relationships. Thais will sometimes explain that sentences without particles are “not beautiful.”

The main Thai dialect has five tones. Thai writing therefore requires four tone markers. These tone markers represent the high tone, the low tone, the falling tone and the rising tone. The mid-tone – also called the common tone – does not require a tone marker.

The word order in a simple Thai sentence is subject-verb-direct object. If there is an indirect object, the word order is subject-verb-direct object-indirect object. Adjectives and adverbs follow the word they modify. Numbers precede the noun.

In Thai sentence structure, you don’t use intransitive verbs when you describe Thai nouns. You say “She beautiful,” or “Computer expensive very.” In Thai, these are complete sentences. They do not require a verb.

Thai suggests plurals with the use of noun classifiers, of which there are many. In effect, Thais say “I have pen, four item” rather than “I have four pens.” Parallel structures exist in English, but they are rare – for example, “50 head of cattle.”

Thai/English Phonology: English has many features that cause difficulties for native-speakers of Thai. This summary reviews pronunciation problems that Thai learners frequently have with English pronunciation.

English has six consonant sounds that do not exist in Thai: /v, th (voiced and unvoiced), z, sh, zh/. Also, the Thai /r/ is quite different from the English retroflex /r/, and Thai speakers frequently pronounce this sound as /l/, even in their own language.

For Thais, many consonant clusters are difficult to pronounce. There are several reasons for this. For one, only two consonants maximum are permitted at the beginnings of words in Thai. In addition, there are no consonant clusters in Thai word endings. Only eight consonants – /n, m, ng, pb, dt, g, y, w/ – are allowed to occur in that position.

While English pronunciation is heavily dependent on consonants, Thai pronunciation is heavily dependent on vowels. Thai has many more vowel sounds than English, and in Thai it is important to pronounce vowels distinctly.

In English, the vowels of unstressed syllables in content words and the vowels of function words are generally reduced or even dropped. English speakers often reduce vowels to schwa (the unstressed sound “uh”); this can make them almost inaudible to the Thai ear.

English function words, which are generally unstressed, are often dramatically reduced. English speech is stress-timed rather than syllable-timed.

The Writing System: Thai uses an alphabet related to that of Sanskrit. Most native-English speakers accustomed to the relative simplicity of the Roman alphabet find it difficult to learn. The system is phonetically quite precise, however. There are few irregular spellings, and to native-Thai speakers the rules of composition are quite natural.

The Thai writing system has 44 consonants that represent only 21 distinct sounds. (Two consonants are obsolete and 12 rarely used. A number of consonants are redundant in the sense that they convey the same sound as other consonants. Part of the reason for this redundancy is that consonants are grouped into three groups – high-tone consonants, middle-tone consonants and low-tone consonants. This approach is used to enable the writer to convey tones.

Each consonant has a character name to help when spelling it out loud. For example, the first consonant in the alphabet is gaw-gài. The first syllable suggests the consonant sound, while the second represents a word (in this case gài or “chicken”) with which to associate the letter.

There are 21 vowels, which are used in various combinations to create 32 different vowel sounds – either long or short vowels. While tone markers are consistently placed above the letters of the alphabet, different vowels are placed in front of, above, behind, under or around the consonants.

The following text illustrates the main features of the Thai writing system. In addition to the placement of vowels and tone markers, note that that written Thai uses no punctuation. There are no capital letters. Full stops, question marks and exclamation marks do not end Thai sentences. Neither does the system use the complex Western arrangement of commas, colons, dashes and other characters used in European punctuation. Also, there are no spaces between words except in the case of Arabic numbers, which writers separate from the Thai text.

ในวันที่ 25 พฤษภาคม 2549 ในหลวงได้รับการถวายรางวัลจากองค์การสหประชาติในความสำเร็จทางด้านการพัฒนาความเป็นอยู่ของมนุษยชาติซึ่งนายโคฟีอันนันเลขาธิการสหประชาชาติได้นำมาถวายด้วยตัวเอง

The text refers to the Human Development Lifetime Achievement Award presented to the King by UN Secretary General Kofi Anan on behalf of the United Nations Development Programme. The award was presented on May 25, 2006 (2549 on the Buddhist calendar).

To Sum up: As this brief discussion illustrates, studying the contrasts between Thai and English can shed light on the errors your Thai students make. Enabling teachers to better understand the linguistic features of another language provides insights into the subtleties of language itself. This should help you become better at the job of teaching English.

Language Teaching: Some Notes on Method

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown


As a teacher, I use the communicative approach to language teaching, and this blog provides much information about its theory and practice. In some ways, the heart of CLT is the lesson planning cycle, which we stress from the beginning. (To download a PDF of my book on the topic, click here.)

To put CLT and lesson planning into context, it will be helpful to tell some of the story of teaching methods. We begin with the tale of teaching approaches and methods. Then we describe the two bêtes noire of language teaching – grammar translation and audiolingualism – before reviewing the direct method and CLT.

Approach, Method, Design and Procedure: In 1963, applied linguist Edward Anthony defined the terms “approach,” “method” and “technique” as they apply to language teaching and his ideas had a great impact on teachers and those who guide them. In his ground-breaking work, Anthony suggested that an approach is the large system of ideas and thought behind a teacher’s lesson plans. Method refers to specific ways to teach English, and each method uses a variety of specific techniques.

Here is what Anthony actually said: “The arrangement is hierarchical. The organizational key is that techniques carry out a method which is consistent with an approach….
• “…An approach is a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the nature of language teaching and learning. An approach is axiomatic. It describes the nature of the subject matter to be taught….
• “…Method is an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material, no part of which contradicts, and all of which is based upon, the selected approach. An approach is axiomatic, a method is procedural…..Within one approach, there can be many methods….
• “A technique is implementational – that which actually takes place in a classroom. It is a particular trick, stratagem, or contrivance used to accomplish an immediate objective. Techniques must be consistent with a method, and therefore in harmony with an approach as well.”

In a review of Anthony’s ideas, two later thinkers – Jack Richards and Ted Rodgers – suggest a rethinking of this hierarchy. Anthony’s package can be improved, they suggest, by eliminating the notion of technique from the pyramid, and adding design and procedure. The following two categories replaced technique at the bottom of their hierarchy.
• Design: The two thinkers propose that design is “that level in which objectives, syllabus, and content are determined, and in which objectives, the roles of teachers, learners and instructional materials are specified.”
• Procedure: The implementation phase of language classes is where the rubber hits the road – the activities that help language learning occur. Rather than use the term implementation, they prefer the “slightly more comprehensive term procedure.”

The two men sum up their revised model with the words: “…a method is theoretically related to an approach, is organizationally determined by a design, and is practically realized in a procedure.” The lesson planning cycle used extensively in this course mirrors Richards’ and Rodgers’ revisions to Anthony’s pioneering work.

In the following discussion, we will talk about methods only, because we are concerned with how language is taught in the classroom rather than the theory behind individual methods. We will not, in other words, discuss the approaches behind the following four methods.

The Grammar Translation Method: The grammar translation method emerged when people of the western world wanted to learn such foreign languages as Latin and Greek. The focus is on learning grammatical rules and memorizing vocabulary and language declensions and conjugations. Typical classroom activities and homework includes text translation and written exercises.

The teacher presents a grammar translation class in the student’s native tongue, and students are not actively encouraged to use the target language in class. The teacher provides elaborate explanations of the grammatical intricacies of the target language, and often focuses on the form and inflection of words. Accuracy receives a great deal of stress. Vocabulary study takes the form of learning lists of often isolated words, and the rules of grammar provide the blueprint for putting words together. Students begin early to read classical texts, which are treated as exercises in grammatical analysis. There is little stress on the content of those texts.

The Audio-lingual Method: Grammar Translation classes lingered in the West until well into the 1970s, and the method is still used in some schools, especially in less-developed countries. However, the system began to be replaced in Western schools in the mid-1950s by a new, “scientific,” method known as Audio-lingualism. Also called the “aural-oral” method, it gets its name from the Latin roots for hearing and speaking. Audiolingualism emphasises pattern drills and conversation practice.

In the audio-lingual classroom, the teacher generally presents new material in dialogue form, and students are expected to mimic her pronunciation and intonation, which receive a great deal of emphasis. There is a great deal of stress on memorizing set phrases and over learning; learners acquire language patterns through repetitive drills. There is little grammatical explanation; the student learns grammar through analogy rather than explanation.

Audio-lingual teachers place great importance on getting students to produce error-free speech. They immediately reinforce successful speech, and quickly correct errors. They teach vocabulary through pronunciation (not the written word), and they make regular use of tapes, language labs, and visual aids. In the classroom, the teacher strongly discourages the use of the student’s mother tongue.

The Direct Method: Although these methods dominated much of language teaching, there were better alternatives available. Notable among these is the direct method, which originated in the 19th century through the work of a number of important thinkers, notably Lambert Sauveur – a Frenchman who opened a language school in Boston in 1869. His system of teaching French became known as the natural method. The direct method is an offshoot.

The basic premise of the direct method is that second language learning should be more like first language learning. The method includes lots of oral interaction and the spontaneous use of language. The teacher discourages translation between first and second languages, and puts little emphasis on the rules of grammar.

The direct method classroom was one of small, intensive classes which stressed both speech and listening comprehension. The teacher gives instruction exclusively in the target language, teaching everyday vocabulary and sentences. The teacher develops oral communication skills in a careful progression that she frequently organizes around questions-and-answer exchanges. The teacher explains new teaching points through modeling and practice.

A direct approach instructor emphasizes correct pronunciation and grammar, which she teaches inductively. She presents concrete vocabulary through demonstration, realia and pictures, for example, and teaches abstract vocabulary through association of ideas. This method was the first to catch “the attention of both language teachers and language teaching specialists, and it offered a methodology that appeared to move language teaching into a new era.”

Communicative Language Teaching: In Western countries, at least, communicative language teaching is the generally accepted norm in the field of second language teaching. It is state-of-the-art.

CLT is based on theories about language acquisition, especially those developed by Stephen Krashen. At the considerable risk of oversimplification, here is a nutshell perspective on the fit between theory and practice. Krashen suggests that learners acquire language through using it for communication. Since most learners study language to use it for communication, this discovery represents a tidy fit between what works and what learners want.

The teacher’s job is to help his students develop communicative skills by experimenting with the second language in class and beyond. In the classroom, the CL teacher creates activities which simulate communication in real-world situations. His activities emphasize learning to communicate through interaction in the target language, and generally use a mix of the four language skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing. These activities enable his learners to internalize and activate their second or foreign language.

The communicative language teacher uses authentic materials and exercises in the classroom, since this enables his students to more easily take their language learning into the real world. The teacher provides opportunities for learners not only to activate the second language, but also to better understand the learning process. He might do this, for example, by helping his learners develop strategies that will speed up the learning process.

In a well-designed lesson, his efforts work together to improve his students’ communicative competence. He has a clear sense of the thinking behind the communicative approach, and the planning cycle enables him to integrate design and procedure into a master class.

What Research Says about Teaching Methods

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Educators base their systems of language teaching on language theory. Here is one summary of teaching methods, based on the work of two Canadian educators. In their technical but thoughtful book, Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada discuss contemporary thinking about how we learn languages, and illustrate how such ideas directly affect the classroom.

Here is a commentary on their five proposals for classroom teaching. The authors describe each method as an imperative the teacher might bring into class.

Grammar Translation and Audiolingualism. A traditional teacher coming into class would insist to her students, “Get it right from the beginning!”

Teachers from both the grammar translation and the audiolingualism schools do this. They emphasize speech, but are reluctant to let their students use it spontaneously. The reason is that they worry about their students forming bad, ugly habits that they cannot break. Since habits are hard to break, it is better to prevent them. Unbreakable habits of speech – they do occur – are said to be “fossilized.”

According to the two Canadians, research does not support the idea that avoiding fossilization by getting it right from the beginning is an effective way to teach. Just the contrary, in fact. In experiments, students learning by this method clearly did better when communicative activities were added to their lessons. That said, many adults prefer these structure-based methods despite their limitations.

Interactionism. The Interactionist view holds that second language learning takes place primarily through talking with other people (“conversational interaction”). When students have meaningful conversations in a second language, both sides of the conversation use behaviours that are quite useful for language learning. Here are some practical examples:
• One partner might make an effort to make sure the other has understood.
• The learner might ask for clarification to make sure he understood.
• The learner may repeat or paraphrase a sentence, to make sure she gets it right.
These are all excellent strategies for language learning, and they lead to the interactionist teacher’s imperative: “Say what you mean and mean what you say!”

This method is based on the idea that, when given the opportunity to engage in meaningful activities, learners will “negotiate for meaning” – clarify and express their intentions, thoughts and opinions in ways that permit them to achieve their learning goals. “Genuine exchanges of information must surely enhance students’ motivation to participate in language learning activities,” the authors say. But then they ask, “Do they…lead to successful language acquisition?” According to the two authors, the research is ambiguous.

Communicative Language Teaching

Lightbown and Spada describe three other methods of classroom teaching, all of which fall generally into the scope of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). To simplify our review of CLT, it is worth quickly reviewing Stephen Krashen’s theory of second language acquisition.

Krashen’s ideas consist of five main hypotheses:
• The acquisition-learning hypothesis
• The monitor hypothesis
• The natural order hypothesis
• The input hypothesis, and
• The affective filter hypothesis.
As we discussed elsewhere, these ideas seem to describe quite effectively how learners acquire second languages.

Of particular importance, Krashen’s ideas have practical value for the classroom warrior wanting to deliver effective lessons. In the following commentary, I suggest that each of the last three Lightbown and Spada imperatives correspond roughly with one or more of Krashen’s hypotheses.

The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis. The authors describe a radical application of Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis in the form of a method of language teaching in which the students “Just listen, and read!” This kind of learning is most likely to take place in a well equipped language lab, where the students use tapes and readings graded to their individual level.

As long as the students are working with language they can comprehend, there is no theoretical reason they cannot acquire a second language. After all, Krashen’s primary thesis is that we can only learn language through comprehensible input. (He adds to this that teachers should stretch their knowledge of the language by providing them with “i+1” encounters – just a tad more of the second language than they can easily understand, to increase their comprehension.)

The “just listen and read” method assumes it is not necessary to drill and memorize language forms. Emphasis is on providing comprehensible input through listening and reading activities. Experimental research has found that this system is effective, but the authors sound a note of caution.

Students develop not only good comprehension (in reading and listening), but also confidence and fluency....However, research does not support the argument that an exclusive focus on meaning in comprehensible input is enough to bring learners to high levels of accuracy in their second language.

Students also need explicit instruction in the forms of language – for example, specific structures. Otherwise, their language skills will remain somewhat limited.

The Natural Order Hypothesis. Lightbown and Spada describe a method which focuses on teaching structural forms, but teaching them in developmental order. Their imperative? “Teach what is teachable!” The concept is that instruction cannot change the ‘natural’ course of development. This is because linguistic structures develop along particular developmental paths. Teaching advanced structures to beginners will not work because the learners do not yet have the ability to process (unconsciously analyse and organise) them.

That, at least, is the theory. As the authors explain, it is difficult to test because the “natural order” of language learning is still unclear. Some things are known – for example, WH questions and Yes/No questions are much easier to acquire than those using question tags (“It’s easy to do, isn’t it?”). However, as a learner begins to reach complicated structures, the difficult language structures are not too well defined.

The Acquisition/Learning Hypothesis. Lightbown and Spada describe one final method. While this course in TEFL finds value in many teaching methods, the authors’ last teaching method is the one we most strongly support. “Get it right in the end!” they say.

This method is the one most in keeping with Krashen’s “monitor model” of second language learning. As our study of Krashen explains, the monitor hypothesis is the idea that conscious learning serves primarily as a monitor or an editor for the language student. It plays a relatively small but necessary role in effective language acquisition, which comes primarily from exposure to comprehensible input and language practice.

The “get it right in the end” method recognizes the importance of explicitly teaching language content – making the study of structure, lexis and phonology a part of language lessons. However, it puts primary emphasis on the idea that students will acquire most language features will be acquired naturally if learners have adequate exposure to the language and a motivation to learn. This view largely agrees with “Teach what is teachable”, but “emphasizes the idea that some aspects of language must be taught and may need to be taught quite explicitly.”

Approach, Method and Technique. All these methods of instruction can play a role in a good language teacher’s toolkit. Communicative Language Teaching is based not on dogma, but on what works to help students learn language effectively. While we believe CLT is the most effective approach to language teaching, we also recognize that is effective because it is eclectic. CLT begins with the idea that the purpose of language learning is to communicate, and uses ideas and practices from any other method if they can help achieve that goal.

CLT is nothing if it is not pragmatic.

Noam Chomsky's Black Box

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.



By Peter McKenzie-Brown

What is language, and where does it come from? The answer to this question has great bearing on how we teach language.

Before the coming of Communicative Language Teaching, most thinkers believed that behaviourism – a powerful approach to psychology – explained language. In effect, according to this view, language is a set of habits we develop through mimicry of our parents and those around us.

We learn language because it brings us a reward of some kind. The basic model these thinkers – led by B.F. Skinner, a renowned Harvard psychologist – used to explain psychological phenomena is a simple one. If an organism responds in a certain way to a stimulus and gets positive reinforcement, its behaviour will be repeated. If it gets no reinforcement or negative reinforcement, its behaviour will stop. Thus, any kind of vocal output can become part of language, given sufficient reinforcement.

This model of language learning had a powerful impact on the teaching method known as audiolingualism. This method was based on the belief that language learning is basically a process of mechanical habit formation. It placed a strong focus on drills, on teaching through speech at the expense of the other skills, on inductive teaching (repeating a structure many times, then deciding for yourself how the grammar works) and on learning vocabulary within a linguistic and cultural context. This approach is still widely used in East Asia.

In effect, behaviourism denied the concept of human nature. It taught that people can be made to become almost anything, given the right sequence of stimuli and responses. On the matter of language, the logical conclusion was that there were no limitations to what language could be. Any linguistic habit that people somehow developed could become part of language. In academic circles these notions were widely accepted until Noam Chomsky turned them upside down.

The Language Instinct: In a famous phrase, Chomsky said he wanted to "look deeper" into some basic questions about human language. His early theoretical books and papers gave his answer to an extremely profound question: Is language infinitely changeable (the basis of audio-lingualism), or are all languages in some way a part of being human? In the following passage, one of Chomsky’s best-known admirers summarizes the thinker’s basic conclusions:

Language is a human instinct. All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the same kinds of grammatical machinery like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement. All normal children develop language without conscious effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they speak in fluent grammatical sentences, outperforming the most sophisticated computers. Brain damage or congenital conditions can make a person a linguistic savant while severely retarded, or unable to speak normally despite high intelligence. All this has led many scientists, beginning with the linguist Noam Chomsky in the late 1950s, to conclude that there are specialized circuits in the human brain, and perhaps specialized genes, that create the gift of articulate speech.

Chomsky’s ideas explained the facts in a way that no other theory can. Acquiring language is not a normal mental problem. Everyone sees small children pick up language effortlessly. But few of us ever give a thought to what an amazing phenomenon this is. No one would expect a three-year-old to master calculus. Yet we are not in the least surprised when a three-year-old learns grammar, which is a much more difficult task. Children learn the rules of their native grammar (whatever it might be) by hearing a limited set of sample sentences. According to Chomsky's followers, the limited information they receive is mathematically insufficient for them to determine grammatical principles, yet somehow they are still able to do so. This is what is sometimes called “The paradox of language acquisition”. As Chomsky explained,

In a given linguistic community, children with very different grammar arrive at comparable grammars, indeed almost identical ones, as far as we know. That is what requires explanation. Each child has a different experience, each child is confronted by different data – but in the end the experience is essentially the same. As a consequence, we have to suppose that all children share the same internal constraints which characterize narrowly the grammar they are going to construct.

Chomsky proposed that each of us has a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) – what he sometimes called a “little black box” – that starts functioning when we are still infants. By the time we are five or six, that device has enabled us to vacuum from our immediate environment a native language based on universal grammar. Put another way, all languages are fundamentally the same, irrespective of the cultures we live in. They are the function of a large number of words (arbitrary symbols whose meaning is set by convention) and a limited number of grammatical rules that are somehow structured into our brains and minds.

Those who learn during the “critical period” – roughly, during early childhood – acquire language without effort. However, our little black boxes begin to function in different ways after we reach six years of age. We remain able to acquire language fairly easily until we reach puberty, after which our ability to acquire language seems to be reduced again.

Older learners must therefore learn languages in quite different ways from the effortless acquisition of young children. The ways in which language acquisition changes form are of vital importance to language teachers.

A helpful book in this area of study is How Languages Are Learned by academics Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada. The two educational psychologists offer useful insights into the differences in learning styles. They say, “We have all heard people say that they cannot learn something until they have seen it. Such learners would fall into the group called ‘visual learners.’ Other people, who may be called ‘aural’ learners, seem to need only to hear something once or twice before they know it. For others, who are referred to as ‘kinaesthetic’ learners, there is a need to add a physical action to the learning process.”

These ideas are common in teaching circles. However, Lightbown and Spada go on to discuss two learning styles that are highly cultural in nature. “In contrast to these perceptually based learning styles, [there is] a cognitive learning style distinction between field independent and field dependent learners. This refers to whether an individual tends to separate details from the general background or to see things more holistically.” In general, westerners, who tend to see things as black or white, are field independent. By contrast, East Asians are field dependent inasmuch as they see things as part of a large mingling of relationships.

In their challenging text, Lightbown and Spada describe three theories about how we acquire our first language. The most important of those theories, innatism and behaviourism are covered at the beginning of this essay. A third approach is called interactionism.

The interactionist position is that “language develops as a result of the complex interplay between the uniquely human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops.” A kind of umbrella that covers several different kinds of language theories, contemporary interactionism assumes the validity of Chomsky’s idea that innate structures in the mind are responsible for language learning, but has a variety of questions about the contributions of environmental factors to language learning.

In a summary of these questions, the authors propose that behaviourism may help explain our acquisition of vocabulary and other parts of grammar. For its part, innatism seems “most plausible in explaining the acquisition of complex grammar.” And “interactionist explanations may be useful for understanding how children relate form and meaning in language, how they interact in conversations, and how they learn to use language appropriately.”